Chapter 6: The Witness's Burden

Chapter 6: The Witness's Burden

Sleep refused to be an escape. It was a shore I couldn't reach, separated from me by a churning sea of impossible truths. I lay on a mattress in the small guest room, the comforting weight of a traditional quilt doing nothing to warm the profound chill that had settled in my marrow. The house was quiet now, the murmurs from the living room having long since faded. But I’d heard them. Whispers about me. Exhaustion. Stress. A fever, maybe? Such a wild imagination. They were diagnosing my sanity, trying to find a rational box to put my terror in, because the alternative was unthinkable.

My father’s words echoed in the dark, a relentless, pounding mantra. Roshan died three years ago. On Serpent’s Pass.

And I had seen him. I had spoken to him. I had felt the impossible cold of his touch.

I had tried to reason my way out of it. My desperate search for proof had only led to a deeper madness. The family car was parked outside, just as my father had said, gleaming under the porch light, not a speck of mountain dust on it. It was cold to the touch, the engine block as lifeless as if it hadn’t been run in days. There was no dead battery, no sign of a struggle. It was pristine.

Then came the final, soul-shattering confirmation. In the living room, amongst a gallery of smiling relatives, was the photograph. Uncle Roshan, younger, vibrant, his familiar, kind eyes smiling out from behind a pane of glass. A string of dried marigolds was draped over the top of the frame, a simple, permanent memorial to the dead. The sight of it had not brought clarity; it had brought a terrifying certainty that my mind was no longer my own. Either I was insane, or the world was.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the image from my mind. The garlanded photograph. The smoky, shifting stripes of the Bāgha Bhūta. The clean, sterile interior of an ambulance that shouldn’t exist. My reality was a fragile construct, and it had been shattered into a million irreconcilable pieces. All I wanted was oblivion, the dreamless black of deep sleep.

Slowly, exhaustion began to win. My frantic thoughts blurred, the sharp edges of my fear softening as I drifted on the edge of consciousness. I felt my body finally growing heavy, sinking into the mattress… but my mind remained awake, alert, a prisoner in a body that was shutting down.

A crushing weight slammed down on my chest.

My eyes flew open, but I couldn't move. I was pinned, paralyzed. A scream built in my throat, a raw, primal sound of terror, but it died before it could reach my lips, trapped by muscles that would not obey. My fingers wouldn't twitch. My head was locked in place, my gaze fixed on the cracked plaster of the ceiling.

This was sleep paralysis. I knew the term. A trick of the brain, a misfiring of signals during the transition between sleep and wakefulness. My logical mind clawed for this explanation, a life raft in a sea of supernatural horror. It’s not real. It’s just a neurological event. Breathe. Just breathe and it will pass.

But this was different.

The air in the room grew cold. It was the same unnatural chill I’d felt radiate from Uncle Roshan, the same cellar-deep coldness of his touch. It leached the warmth from under the quilt, seeping into my skin, into my bones. The silence of the room deepened, becoming a heavy, pressing void, just like the dead silence on the pass right before the howl.

I wasn't alone.

I couldn't turn my head, couldn't scan the corners of the room, but I knew, with a certainty that transcended sight, that something was there. A presence stood in the periphery, a patch of darkness that was blacker than the surrounding shadows. It wasn't the hulking, bestial terror of the Bāgha Bhūta; it was something else. A quiet, watchful weight. It was the suffocating stillness of the grave.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. I tried to fight, to force a finger to move, to make a sound, anything to break the spell. But the weight on my chest intensified, pressing the air from my lungs. It felt like a hand, broad and impossibly heavy, holding me down. The cold intensified, and with it came a faint, clean scent—ozone and winter air. The smell of the ghost ambulance.

This wasn't a hallucination. This was a continuation. The thing that had saved me on the pass had followed me here. The rescue wasn't over. Perhaps it would never be over.

My vision began to tunnel, the edges turning grey. I was suffocating, drowning in the crushing silence and the oppressive cold. A single, terrifying thought bloomed in my mind: this is how I die, paralyzed and unseen in a quiet room, silenced by a phantom I cannot even look at.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it was gone.

With a convulsive gasp, I broke free. I shot upright, the quilt flying off me, my body drenched in a cold sweat. The weight vanished. The cold receded, replaced by the normal, cool air of the night. I twisted around, my eyes scanning every inch of the room.

It was empty. The moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating a simple guest room: a wooden chair, a small table, my discarded hoodie. There was nothing there. Nothing but the lingering echo of absolute terror.

I sat there for a long time, shaking, my breath coming in ragged, painful sobs. The scientific explanation of sleep paralysis felt like a child’s story now, a flimsy shield against a terrible truth. This was no random brain-glitch. It was a message. A reminder.

And in that trembling silence, I finally understood. My family’s perfect, shared amnesia… it wasn’t a curse. It was a gift. A protection. Roshan—the spirit of Roshan—had intervened, pulling us from the jaws of the Bāgha Bhūta. He had erected a psychic barrier, wiping their memories of the event clean to spare them the horror, the madness, the very thing I was experiencing now. He had allowed them to arrive safely, their minds sealed, their journey nothing more than a smooth, uneventful drive.

But a supernatural act of that magnitude required a price. An anchor. It needed a witness.

One person had to remember. One person had to carry the knowledge of what truly happened on Serpent’s Pass. One person had to bear the burden of the truth, to feel the cold touch of the guardian who had saved them.

Me.

I was the witness. The price of my family’s safety was my sanity.

The carefree young man who had joked about his father’s driving and scoffed at old legends was gone, left for dead somewhere on that dark, winding road. In his place was someone else, a haunted keeper of a terrifying secret. My perception of the world—of life and death, of reality itself—was shattered forever. I looked at my hands, expecting them to be different, older. I felt a hundred years old.

The weight of this knowledge was heavier than the phantom presence that had pinned me to the bed. I was alone, adrift in a reality no one else could see or would ever believe. The truth of Serpent’s Pass was my burden to carry, a ghost that would sit on my shoulder for the rest of my life, a constant, cold reminder that I had glimpsed the world behind the veil. And it would never let me go.